At the heart of every women’s sexual health scandal, you’ll find pineapples. Always pineapples, never bananas. That sweet staple from Thika town has somehow found its way into the most bizarre myths about women’s bodies. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me if pineapples were good for the vagina, I’d be driving a wine-red Toyota Auris by December. But with the Kenyan government hell-bent on taxing everything, even the pennies for my thoughts, that dream remains far-fetched.
Let me clarify—I’m a communications officer by day and a sex educator by night (well, weekends, but that doesn’t sound as dramatic). It may sound like an odd combo, but both jobs involve the same thing: fighting misinformation. I get paid to tell people, si ni mimi nakushow. You might be wondering; how did I end up here? What flap of the butterfly’s wings sent me down this path?
Some people’s career paths seem obvious in hindsight. The kid who always nursed stray cats, now a vet. The one who fixed their parents’ Great Wall TV aerial and now contends with AI as an engineer. Some lose loved ones to disease and become surgeons. Others read Ben Carson’s Gifted Hands as kids and now rock white dust coats. Then there’s that one guy who was asked to draw a ball on the blackboard in nursery school and now teaches full-time.
Me? I grew up listening. I listened to my mother, who worked for gender-based violence (GBV) survivors and came home with stories like the time a woman refused to let officers arrest her abusive husband because, in her words, “my bed will be cold at night.” My mother was accused of breaking up their marriage, even though the woman had called the police herself. I listened during the many workshops I was dragged to—because we could not afford a babysitter—where women learned how to use female condoms. In uni, I listened to my friends rant about unsatisfactory sexual experiences. And now, I listen to women’s stories on my podcast, All Protocols Observed, where pineapples come up more than you’d expect.
I’ve learned one simple truth: sex is a fact of life, and sexual health is crucial for wellbeing. But for every serious conversation, there’s a lighter side. Because sex education isn’t just about sex—it’s about gender dynamics, relationships, and the bizarre myths people share on Elon Musk’s bird app. The very same people who tweet like they’re hardened warriors but, in reality, are raiding their girlfriends’ skincare products and wearing bonnets indoors. But this story isn’t about them. It’s about pineapples. The fruit that’s been wrongly accused of doing more than providing vitamins and nourishment to the body.
Flashback to my high school days in Western Kenya—I went to an all-girls institution where discipline meant denied autonomy and punishment, and the only thing more rigid than the rules of the school was the English we spoke. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if you wanted to speak to us, you’d better come armed with Oxford’s latest dictionary. Except, if you came from Nairobi. In that case, you need only declare so and the girls in my school would fold and become patty in your hands.
But inside that school, beneath all the flowery reputations, madness roamed freely. My class, notorious even by our standards, was often compared to a riot of testosterone over at Maseno Boys. Actually, Maseno School. That is the name they preferred. No. They insisted on it. We defied every rule, fought other classes, led school riots, and left a trail of suspended and expelled students in our wake. Yet somehow, six brave teachers were tasked with managing us, including our class teacher, who couldn’t have cared less if we burned the place down.
One of our guardians was a tall, skinny fellow with a disproportionately large head, earning him the nickname ‘Lollipop.’ Poor guy. He had just graduated from university and was assigned to teach us Physics. He looked like one of those lollipops he was always suckling on. Picture a man who looks like he should be starring in a podcast, giving advice about how “real men” should be rough, but in reality, he had the softest hands. And the man could not pronounce the word ‘cubic’—it was always ‘chubic,’ and that never failed to crack us up. Lollipop had the unenviable job of teaching girls who had convinced themselves that studying Physics was a waste of time. “What would our husbands be doing if we understood Physics?” we asked, half-joking, half-serious. Looking back, it’s sad how ingrained societal roles were, even at such a young age. Yet, we pressed on with our folly, making suggestive comments, roasting him whenever he ignored them, and, on particularly wicked days, asking if it was his time of the ‘man-th’, or if he was ‘mens-trating.’
He found refuge in his office, tucked deep inside the Physics laboratory, which doubled as storage for chemicals and specimens from the other science labs. While the office afforded him much needed quiet and peace from our rowdy lot, there was always a funky smell in the air that even open windows could not get rid off. Ever the resourceful one, Lollipop bought himself a Tropical pineapple-scented air freshener. He always showed up to class smelling like pineapples. Visiting his office was less about Physics and more about inhaling that sweet scent of pineapples instead of whatever toxic fumes wafted in from the chemicals.
Now, imagine a compound with over 1,000 teenage girls, hormones raging, creativity on overdrive—chaos. Our school banned anything beyond body lotion and simple hair oil, so people got creative. Hand sanitizer, for instance, became a go-to perfume. Long before the pandemic made sanitizers popular, girls at a local institution in Western were drenching themselves in it and pheromones, making male teachers’ lives more difficult.
One day, Lollipop left his pineapple-scented air freshener out in the open, and my classmates descended on it like locusts. They sprayed themselves head-to-toe and went out to cause chaos wherever they could. That was the last we saw of the pineapple-scented air freshener. Soon after, his office was moved closer to the staffroom, and three weeks later, Lollipop packed his bags and left, his will to teach drained to the last drop. We broke his spirit, and to this day, I wonder if he ever touched another can of pineapple air freshener again.
You’d think that was the end of pineapples in my life. But here I am, years later, now having to educate people that while diet can affect body fluids, there’s no scientific evidence that pineapples change how your body smells or tastes. That you can have a unique experience with pineapples, but do not invent your own facts. For those with vaginas, it’s natural to have a unique scent that changes based on things like your menstrual cycle, sweat, or even the food you eat. Bodies aren’t meant to smell like flowers or fruit, and vaginas are naturally acidic, not tropical. Pineapple-scented products are not more than marketing gimmicks preying on insecurities and the general lack of sex education.
But hey, if you still don’t believe me, at least support a local farmer. Eat pineapples. They’re good for your health.